Locating Medical History: The Stories and Their Meanings

5 Karl Sudhoff and ‘‘the Fall’’ of German Medical History

C H A P T E R F I V E Karl Sudhoff and ‘‘the Fall’’ of German Medical History Thomas Rütten Karl Sudhoff (1853–1938) was born in Frankfurt am Main on 26 November 1853, the son of a protestant pastor. He attended primary school and two years of grammar school in Frankfurt, after which the family moved to Zweibrücken and, shortly thereafter, to Kreuznach, where he completed his secondary education and gained his Abitur in 1871. In the autumn of the same year, he began medical study at Erlangen University, then continued first at Tübingen and later in Berlin. On 2 August 1875, Sudhoff was awarded a doctorate in medicine. After brief stints as a hospital doctor in Augsburg and Vienna, he opened his own general practice in Bergen near Frankfurt in 1878, and married in August of the following year. In 1883, he moved his practice to Hochdahl near Düsseldorf, where he worked as a doctor to the local iron and steel works while using his spare time for extensive research in the history of medicine, notably on Paracelsus. On 1 July 1905, Sudhoff was offered a professorship at Leipzig University, where he would subsequently be instrumental in establishing the Puschmann Foundation–funded Institute of Medical History. As a permanently appointed professor extraordinarius and, from 1922–1923 onward, as a full professor, Sudhoff taught and published exclusively in medical history until his retirement in 96 Traditions 1925. After Henry E. Sigerist, who succeeded him to his chair, left for Baltimore in 1932, Sudhoff returned to his institute once more as its interim director, until Walter von Brunn finally took over from the eighty-year-old in 1934. Highly honored and a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP), Sudhoff died on 8 October 1938 in Salzwedel, at the home of one of his sons.1 These, roughly, are the vital statistics of Karl Sudhoff’s life. However, these rather conventional biographical facts, in their simplicity and innocence, do not begin to hint at the veritable Sudhoff cult that has characterized German medical history in particular from the first decades of the twentieth through the present. No other German medical historian ever received so many birthday honors, congratulatory messages, and Festschrift contributions,2 not to mention honorary medals,3 than Karl Sudhoff. Sudhoff was honored in Hochdahl in 1933 with a commemorative plaque outside his erstwhile residence and a ‘‘Professor Karl Sudhoffstra ße.’’4 In 1938, the Institute of Medical History at Leipzig was renamed ‘‘Karl-Sudhoff-Institut,’’ while the scholarly journal he founded had already changed its title to Sudhoffs Archiv in 1922.5 To this day, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Geschichte der Medizin, Naturwissenschaft und Technik (DGGMNT, German Society for the History of Medicine and Natural Science) annually awards its Karl Sudhoff Commemorative Medal, with the Sudhoff Commemorative Lecture forming an integral part of the award ceremony.6 Such efforts, of course, do have a foundation: Sudhoff’s role as the founding father of medical history as a properly institutionalized and professional discipline within the German academy, his unswerving commitment to strengthening the discipline in Europe and in North America, his impressive scholarly oeuvre, and his pioneering work in the field of research management are accomplishments that stand undisputed. Yet, the impartial observer cannot help but note a personality cult surrounding the man. Stereotypical epithets such as ‘‘doyen’’ (Altmeister), ‘‘master’’ (Meister), ‘‘leader’’ (Führer), ‘‘spiritus rector,’’ ‘‘magister mundi,’’ ‘‘Nestor,’’ ‘‘patriarch,’’ and ‘‘absolute king’’ are not meant simply to honor an eminent scholar but also to validate a small discipline that can see itself personified—and thus celebrate its past as well as anticipate future achievements —in one of its great figureheads.7 On the whole, the festive speakers, obituary writers, institutional successors, and pupils give the impression that Sudhoff was the pivot, the gravitational center of the entire discipline, in relation to which his colleagues were mere satellites. But Sudhoff’s role as the arch progenitor of German medical history does not have its roots in his research and its subsequent reception alone. Rather, his international network of correspondents, in which Sudhoff invested a great deal of en- Karl Sudhoff and ‘‘the Fall’’ of German Medical History 97 ergy and which, to my mind, has not received adequate scholarly attention,8 attests to his prominent role as a referee, initiator, organizer, and, most importantly , passionate writer...